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Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE ***
BY
MARGARET SANGER
* * * * * *
DEDICATED TO
* * * * * *
PREFACE
The modern Woman Movement, like the modern Labour Movement, may be
said to have begun in the Eighteenth century. The Labour movement
arose out of the Industrial Revolution with its resultant tendency to
over-population, to unrestricted competition, to social misery and
disorder. The Woman movement appeared as an at first neglected
by-product of the French Revolution with its impulses of general
human expansion, of freedom and of equality.
Since then, as we know, these two movements have each had a great and
vigorous career which is still far from completed. On the whole they
have moved independently along separate lines, and have at times
seemed indeed almost hostile to each other. That has ceased to be the
case. Of recent years it has been seen not only that these two
movements are not hostile, but that they may work together
harmoniously for similar ends.
These facts have long been known to the few who view the world
realistically. But it is not the few who rule the world. It is the
masses--the ignorant, emotional, volatile, superstitious masses--who
rule the world. It is they who choose the few supreme persons who
manage or mismanage the world's affairs. Even the most stupid of us
must be able to see how it is done now, for during recent years the
whole process has been displayed before us on the very largest scale.
That is why the little book by Margaret Sanger, whose right to speak
with authority on these matters we all recognize, cannot be too widely
read. To the few who think, though they may here and there differ on
points of detail, it is all as familiar as A. B. C. But to the
millions who rule the world it is not familiar, and still less to the
handful of superior persons whom the masses elect to supreme
positions. Therefore, let this book be read; let it be read by every
man and woman who can read. And the sooner it is not only read but
acted on, the better for the world.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
* * * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
VI CRIES OF DESPAIR
X CONTRACEPTIVES OR ABORTION?
* * * * * *
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
Only in recent years has woman's position as the gentler and weaker
half of the human family been emphatically and generally questioned.
Men assumed that this was woman's place; woman herself accepted it. It
seldom occurred to anyone to ask whether she would go on occupying it
forever.
Woman's acceptance of her inferior status was the more real because it
was unconscious. She had chained herself to her place in society and
the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only
chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal
for the masculine civilizations of the world. In accepting her r�le as
the "weaker and gentler half," she accepted that function. In turn,
the acceptance of that function fixed the more firmly her rank as an
inferior.
Woman's passivity under the burden of her disastrous task was almost
altogether that of ignorant resignation. She knew virtually nothing
about her reproductive nature and less about the consequences of her
excessive child-bearing. It is true that, obeying the inner urge of
their natures, _some_ women revolted. They went even to the extreme of
infanticide and abortion. Usually their revolts were not general
enough. They fought as individuals, not as a mass. In the mass they
sank back into blind and hopeless subjection. They went on breeding
with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who
become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.
She must not think to pay this debt in any superficial way. She cannot
pay it with palliatives--with child-labor laws, prohibition,
regulation of prostitution and agitation against war. Political
nostrums and social panaceas are but incidentally and superficially
useful. They do not touch the source of the social disease.
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while
woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her
reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
The second and more serious barrier is her own ignorance of the extent
and effect of her submission. Until she knows the evil her subjection
has wrought to herself, to her progeny and to the world at large, she
cannot wipe out that evil.
She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself
and of the consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth
control. Through birth control she will attain to voluntary
motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she
will cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity. Then, through
the understanding of the intuitive forward urge within her, she will
not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it.
CHAPTER II
WOMAN'S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
This is the error into which the historian has almost universally
fallen. It is also a common error among sociologists. It is the
fashion nowadays, for instance, to explain all social unrest in terms
of economic conditions. This is a valuable working theory and has done
much to awaken men to their injustice toward one another, but it
ignores the forces within humanity which drive it to revolt. It is
these forces, rather than the conditions upon which they react, that
are the important factors. Conditions change, but the animating force
goes on forever.
So, too, with woman's struggle for emancipation. Women in all lands
and all ages have instinctively desired family limitation. Usually
this desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the
pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration
_toward freedom_ has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the
rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent.
It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child
abandonment and abortion.
These violent means of freeing herself from the chains of her own
reproductivity have been most in evidence where economic conditions
have made the care of children even more of a burden than it would
otherwise have been. But, whether in the luxurious home of the
Athenian, the poverty-ridden dwelling of the Chinese, or the crude hut
of the primitive Australian savage, the woman whose development has
been interfered with by the bearing and rearing of children has tried
desperately, frantically, too often in vain, to take and hold her
freedom.
Still further light is shed upon the real sources of the practice, as
well as upon the improvement of the status of woman through the
practice, by an English student of conditions in India. Captain S.
Charles MacPherson, of the Madras Army, in the Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society for 1852, said: "I can here but very briefly advert to
the customs and feelings which the practice of infanticide (among the
Khonds of Orissa) alternately springs from and produces. The influence
and privileges of women are exceedingly great among the Khonds, and
are, I believe, greatest among the tribes which practice infanticide.
Their opinions have great weight in all public and private affairs;
their direct participation is often considered essential in the
former."
If infanticide did not spring from a desire within the woman herself,
from a desire stronger than motherhood, would it prevail where women
enjoy an influence equal to that of men? And does not the fact that
the women in question do enjoy such influence, point unmistakably to
the motive behind the practice?
Infanticide did not go out of fashion with the advance from savagery
to barbarism and civilization. Rather, it became, as in Greece and
Rome, a recognized custom with advocates among leaders of thought and
action.
Aristotle, who believed that the state should fix the number of
children each married pair should have, has this to say in _Politics_,
Book VII, Chapter V:
In Athens, while the citizen wives were unable to throw off the
restrictions of the laws which kept them at home, the great number of
_hetera_, or stranger women, were the glory of the "Golden Age." The
homes of these women who were free from the burden of too many
children became the gathering places of philosophers, poets, sculptors
and statesmen. The _hetera_ were their companions, their inspiration
and their teachers. Aspasia, one of the greatest women of antiquity,
was such an emancipated individuality. True to the urge of the
feminine spirit, she, like Sappho, the poetess of Lesbia, sought to
arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves.
One writer says of her efforts: "This woman determined to do her
utmost to elevate her sex. The one method of culture open to women at
that time was poetry. There was no other form of literature, and
accordingly she systematically trained her pupils to be poets, and to
weave into the verse the noblest maxims of the intellect and the
deepest emotions of the heart. Young pupils with richly endowed minds
flocked to her from all countries and formed a kind of Woman's
College.
"There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek
the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and
monotonous routine to which woman's life was sacrificed, and they were
anxious to rise to something nobler and better."
Can there be any doubt that the unfortunate "citizen wives" of Athens,
bound by law to their homes, envied the brilliant careers of the
"stranger women," and sought all possible means of freedom? And can
there be any doubt that they acquiesced in the practice of infanticide
as a means to that end? Otherwise, how could the custom of destroying
infants have been so thoroughly embedded in the jurisprudence, the
thought and the very core of Athenian civilization?
As to the Spartan women, Aristotle says that they ruled their husbands
and owned two-fifths of the land. Surely, had they not approved of
infanticide for some very strong reasons of their own, they would have
abolished it.
Here again the wide prevalence of the custom is the first and best
proof that women are driven by some great pressure within themselves
to accede to it. If further proof were necessary, it is afforded by
the testimony of Occidentals who have lived in China, that Chinese
midwives are extremely skillful in producing early abortion. Abortions
are not performed without the consent and usually only at the demand
of the woman.
The nations mentioned are typical of the world, except those countries
where information concerning contraceptives has enabled women to limit
their families without recourse to operations.
"'It seems probable that the foetus does not possess a rational soul
as long as it is in the womb, and only begins to possess it when born,
and consequently in no abortion is homicide committed.' Sextus V
inflicted severe penalties for the crime of abortion at any period;
these were in some degree mitigated by Gregory XIV, who, however,
still held that those producing the abortion of an animated foetus
should be subject to them, viz., and excommunication reserved to the
bishop and also an 'irregularity' reserved to the Pope himself for
absolution."
To-day, the Roman church stands firmly upon the proposition that
"directly intended, artificial abortion must be regarded as wrongful
killing, as murder." [Footnote: Pastoral Medicine] But it required a
long time for it to reach that point, in the face of the demand for
relief from large families.
Are you horrified at the record set down in this chapter? It is well
that you should be. You cannot help society to apply the fundamental
remedy unless you know these facts and are conscious of their fullest
significance.
This problem comes home with peculiar force to the people of America.
Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be
multiplied? Do we want the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so
much needed for our racial development, to perish in these sordid,
abnormal experiences? Or, do we wish to permit woman to find her way
to fundamental freedom through safe, unobjectionable, scientific
means? We have our choice. Upon our answer to these questions depends
in a tremendous degree the character and the capabilities of the
future American race.
CHAPTER III
Each of us has an ideal of what the American of the future should be.
We have been told times without number that out of the mixture of
stocks, the intermingling of ideas and aspirations, there is to come a
race greater than any which has contributed to the population of the
United States. What is the basis for this hope that is so generally
indulged in? If the hope is founded upon realities, how may it be
realized? To understand the difficulties and the obstacles to be
overcome before the dream of a greater race in America can be
attained, is to understand something of the task before the women who
shall give birth to that race.
What material is there for a greater American race? What elements make
up our present millions? Where do they live? How do they live? In what
direction does our national civilization bend their ideals? What is
the effect of the "melting pot" upon the foreigner, once he begins to
"melt"? Are we now producing a freer, juster, more intelligent, more
idealistic, creative people out of the varied ingredients here?
Of the foreign stock in the United States, the last general census,
compiled in 1910, shows that 25.7 per cent was German, 14 per cent was
Irish, 8.5 per cent was Russian or Finnish, 7.2 was English, 6.5 per
cent Italian and 6.2 per cent Austrian. The Abstract of the same
census points out several significant facts. The Western European
strains in this country are represented by a majority of native-born
children of foreign-born or mixed parentage. This is because the
immigration from those sources has been checked. On the other hand,
immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Russia and
Finland, increased 175.4 per cent from 1900 to 1910. During that
period, the slums of Europe dumped their submerged inhabitants into
America at a rate almost double that of the preceding decade, and the
flow was still increasing at the time the census was taken. So it is
more than likely that when the next census is taken it will be found
that following 1910 there was an even greater flow from Spain, Italy,
Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, and other countries where the iron
hand of economic and political tyrannies had crushed great populations
into ignorance and want. These peoples have not been in the United
States long enough to produce great families. The census of 1920 will
in all probability tell a story of a greater and more serious problem
than did the last.
Only one state in the Union--North Carolina--has less than one per
cent of the white foreign stock. New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah have more than
fifty per cent foreign stock. Eleven states, including those on the
Pacific Coast, have from 35 to 50 per cent. Maine, Ohio and Kansas
have from 25 to 35 per cent. Maryland, Indiana, Missouri and Texas
have from 15 to 25 per cent. These proportions are increasing rather
than decreasing, owing to the extraordinarily high birth rate of the
foreign strains.
That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them
their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are
handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true. But they also
bring in their hearts a desire for freedom from all the tyrannies that
afflict the earth. They would not be here if they did not bear within
them the hardihood of pioneers, a courage of no mean order. They have
the simple faith that in America they will find equality, liberty and
an opportunity for a decent livelihood. And they have something else.
The cell plasms of these peoples are freighted with the potentialities
of the best in Old World civilization. They come from lands rich in
the traditions of courage, of art, music, letters, science and
philosophy. Americans no longer consider themselves cultured unless
they have journeyed to these lands to find access to the treasures
created by men and women of this same blood. The immigrant brings the
possibilities of all these things to our shores, but where is the
opportunity to reproduce in the New World the cultures of the old?
There were in the United States, when the Federal Industrial Relations
Committee finished its work in 1915, several million migratory
workers, most of them white, many of them married but separated from
their families, who were compelled, like themselves, to struggle with
dire want.
"It is the tragedy of our whole national life--how these people live
in such times as these. We have not yet gathered the fruits of such an
industrial condition in this country. We have been saved thus far by
reason of the newness of our national life, our vast public lands now
almost exhausted, our great natural resources now fast being seized
and held, but the hour of reckoning will come."
From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the
feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there
are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever
been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more
inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their
members. Estimates vary from 350,000 at the present time to nearly
400,000 as early as 1890, Henry H. Goddard, Ph. D., of the Vineland,
N. J., Training School, being authority for the latter statement. Only
34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the
United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind--piling
up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are
notoriously prolific in reproduction. The close relationship between
poverty and ignorance and the production of feebleminded is shown by
Anne Moore, Ph.D., in a report to the Public Education Association of
New York in 1911. She found that an overwhelming proportion of the
classified feebleminded children in New York schools came from large
families living in overcrowded slum conditions, and that only a small
percentage were born of native parents.
Sixty thousand prostitutes go and come anew each year in the United
States. This army of unfortunates, as social workers and scientists
testify, come from families living under like conditions of want.
In the New York City schools alone in December, 1916, 61 per cent of
the children were suffering from undernourishment and 21 per cent in
immediate danger of it. These facts, also the result of the conditions
outlined, were discovered by the city Bureau of Child Hygiene.
Does this picture horrify the reader? This is not the whole truth. A
few scattered statistics lack the power to reflect the broken lives of
overworked fathers, the ceaseless, increasing pain of overburdened
mothers and the agony of childhood fighting its way against the
handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, inadequate training and
stifling toil.
Men have sentimentalized about them and legislated upon them. They
have denounced them and they have applied reforms. But it has all been
ridiculously, cruelly futile.
This is the condition of things for which those stand who demand more
and more children. Each child born under such conditions but makes
them worse--each child in its own person suffers the consequence of
the intensified evils.
We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged
mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth
children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged
and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of
racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures
flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the
time and the number of children who shall result from the union,
automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth
weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who
must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit,
brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is
not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those
things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we
can hope that the "melting pot" will refine. We shall see that it will
save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of
physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an
American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give
to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination.
CHAPTER IV
The women of this class are the greatest sufferers of all. Not only do
they bear the material hardships and deprivations in common with the
rest of the family, but in the case of the mother, these are
intensified. It is the man and the child who have first call upon the
insufficient amount of food. It is the man and the child who get the
recreation, if there is any to be had, for the man's hours of labor
are usually limited by law or by his labor union.
It is the woman who suffers first from hunger, the woman whose
clothing is least adequate, the woman who must work all hours, even
though she is not compelled, as in the case of millions, to go into a
factory to add to her husband's scanty income. It is she, too, whose
health breaks first and most hopelessly, under the long hours of work,
the drain of frequent childbearing, and often almost constant nursing
of babies. There are no eight-hour laws to protect the mother against
overwork and toil in the home; no laws to protect her against ill
health and the diseases of pregnancy and reproduction. In fact there
has been almost no thought or consideration given for the protection
of the mother in the home of the workingman.
There are no general health statistics to tell the full story of the
physical ills suffered by women as a result of too great
reproductivity. But we get some light upon conditions through the
statistics on maternal mortality, compiled by Dr. Grace L. Meigs, for
the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. These
figures do not include the deaths of women suffering from diseases
complicated by pregnancy.
Still, leaving out all the hundreds of thousands of women who die
because pregnancy has complicated serious diseases, Dr. Meigs finds
that "in 1913, the death rate per 100,000 of the population from all
conditions caused by childbirth was little lower than that from
typhoid fever. This rate would be almost quadrupled if only the group
of the population which can be affected, women of child-bearing ages,
were considered. In 1913, childbirth caused more deaths among women 15
to 44 years old than any disease except tuberculosis."
From what sort of homes come these deaths from childbirth? Most of
them occur in overcrowded dwellings, where food, care, sanitation,
nursing and medical attention are inadequate. Where do we find most of
the tuberculosis and much of the other disease which is aggravated by
pregnancy? In the same sort of home.
The deadly chain of misery is all too plain to anyone who takes the
trouble to observe it. A woman of the working class marries and with
her husband lives in a degree of comfort upon his earnings. Her
household duties are not beyond her strength. Then the children begin
to come--one, two, three, four, possibly five or more. The earnings of
the husband do not increase as rapidly as the family does. Food,
clothing and general comfort in the home grow less as the numbers of
the family increase. The woman's work grows heavier, and her strength
is less with each child. Possibly--probably--she has to go into a
factory to add to her husband's earnings. There she toils, doing her
housework at night. Her health goes, and the crowded conditions and
lack of necessities in the home help to bring about disease--especially
tuberculosis. Under the circumstances, the woman's chances of
recovering from each succeeding childbirth grow less. Less too are
the chances of the child's surviving, as shown by tables in another
chapter. Unwanted children, poverty, ill health, misery, death--these
are the links in the chain, and they are common to most of the
families in the class described in the preceding chapter.
Nor is the full story of the woman's sufferings yet told. Grievous as
is her material condition, her spiritual deprivations are still
greater. By the very fact of its existence, mother love demands its
expression toward the child. By that same fact, it becomes a necessary
factor in the child's development. The mother of too many children, in
a crowded home where want, ill health and antagonism are perpetually
created, is deprived of this simplest personal expression. She can
give nothing to her child of herself, of her personality. Training is
impossible and sympathetic guidance equally so. Instead, such a mother
is tired, nervous, irritated and ill-tempered; a determent, often,
instead of a help to her children. Motherhood becomes a disaster and
childhood a tragedy.
It goes without saying that this woman loses also all opportunity of
personal expression outside her home. She has neither a chance to
develop social qualities nor to indulge in social pleasures. The
feminine element in her--that spirit which blossoms forth now and then
in women free from such burdens--cannot assert itself. She can
contribute nothing to the wellbeing of the community. She is a
breeding machine and a drudge--she is not an asset but a liability to
her neighborhood, to her class, to society. She can be nothing as long
as she is denied means of limiting her family.
In sharp contrast with these women who ignorantly bring forth large
families and who thereby enslave themselves, we find a few women who
have one, two or three children or no children at all. These women,
with the exception of the childless ones, live full-rounded lives.
They are found not only in the ranks of the rich and the well-to-do,
but in the ranks of labor as well. They have but one point of basic
difference from their enslaved sisters--they are not burdened with the
rearing of large families.
We have no need to call upon the historian, the sociologist nor the
statistician for our knowledge of this situation. We meet it every day
in the ordinary routine of our lives. The women who are the great
teachers, the great writers, the artists, musicians, physicians, the
leaders of public movements, the great suffragists, reformers, labor
leaders and revolutionaries are those who are not compelled to give
lavishly of their physical and spiritual strength in bearing and
rearing large families. The situation is too familiar for discussion.
Where a woman with a large family is contributing directly to the
progress of her times or the betterment of social conditions, it is
usually because she has sufficient wealth to employ trained nurses,
governesses, and others who perform the duties necessary to child
rearing. She is a rarity and is universally recognized as such.
The women with small families, however, are free to make their choice
of those social pleasures which are the right of every human being and
necessary to each one's full development. They can be and are, each
according to her individual capacity, comrades and companions to their
husbands--a privilege denied to the mother of many children. Theirs is
the opportunity to keep abreast of the times, to make and cultivate a
varied circle of friends, to seek amusements as suits their taste and
means, to know the meaning of real recreation. All these things remain
unrealized desires to the prolific mother.
Fit mothers of the race are these, the courted comrades of the men
they choose, rather than the "slaves of slaves." For theirs is the
magic power--the power of limiting their families to such numbers as
will permit them to live full-rounded lives. Such lives are the
expression of the feminine spirit which is woman _and all of her_--not
merely art, nor professional skill, nor intellect--but all that woman
is, or may achieve.
CHAPTER V
The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing
into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day
is breeding too many children. These statements may startle those who
have never made a thorough investigation of the problem. They are,
nevertheless, well considered, and the truth of them is abundantly
borne out by an examination of facts and conditions which are part of
everyday experience or observation.
The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the
members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were
asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light
of one's education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a
number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor,
child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into
prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly
cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her
mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a
prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up
and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful
labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as
well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by
overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter.
Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any
considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day. The
large family--especially the family too large to receive adequate care--is
the one thing necessary to the perpetuation of these and other evils and
is therefore a greater evil than any one of them.
The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive
childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the
most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America
hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who
have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering
their children, incapable of enjoying life.
The effect of the large family upon the father is only less disastrous
than it is upon the mother. The spectacle of the young man, happy in
health, strength and the prospect of a joyful love life, makes us
smile in sympathy. But this same young man ten years later is likely
to present a spectacle as sorry as it is familiar. If he finds that
the children come one after another at short intervals--so fast indeed
that no matter how hard he works, nor how many hours, he cannot keep
pace with their needs--the lover whom all the world loves will have
been converted into a disheartened, threadbare incompetent, whom all
the world pities or despises. Instead of being the happy, competent
father, supporting one or two children as they should be supported, he
is the frantic struggler against the burden of five or six, with the
tragic prospect of several more. The ranks of the physically weakened,
mentally dejected and spiritually hopeless young fathers of large
families attest all too strongly the immorality of the system.
If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not
enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon
the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United
States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve
months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or
indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting
from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.
Deaths During
First Year.
1st born children 23%
2nd " " 20%
3rd " " 21%
4th " " 23%
5th " " 26%
6th " " 29%
7th " " 31%
8th " " 33%
9th " " 36%
10th " " 41%
11th " " 51%
12th " " 60%
Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance
to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and
less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live
twelve months.
This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go
farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a
year die before they reach the age of five.
"How many are too many? ... Any more than the mother can look after
and the father make a living for ... Under present conditions as soon
as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go
to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing
this, they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but
indirectly, they drag down the father's wage ... The home becomes a
mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with
weariness and minds drunk with sleep." And if they survive the
factory, they marry to perpetuate and multiply their ignorance,
weakness and diseases.
What have large families to do with prostitution? Ask anyone who has
studied the problem. The size of the family has a direct bearing on
the lives of thousands of girls who are living in prostitution.
Poverty, lack of care and training during adolescence, overcrowded
housing conditions which accompany large families are universally
recognized causes of "waywardness" in girls. Social workers have cried
out in vain against these conditions, pointing to their inevitable
results.
While it is true that they have resources at their command which ease
the burden of child-bearing and child rearing immeasurably, it is also
true that the wealthy mother, as well as the poverty-stricken mother,
must give from her own system certain elements which it takes time to
replace. Excessive childbearing is harder on the woman who lacks care
than on the one who does not, but both alike must give their bodies
time to recover from the strain of childbearing. If the women in
fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine
"race-suicide"[A] fanatics they could within a few years be down to the
condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents
and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured
motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that
motherhood upon the number of children.
One thing we know--the woman who has escaped the chains of too great
reproductivity will never again wear them. The birth rate of the
wealthy and upper classes will never appreciably rise. The woman of
these classes is free of her most oppressive bonds. Being free, we
have a right to expect much of her. We expect her to give still
greater expression to her feminine spirit--we expect her to enrich the
intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual life of the world. We
expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery,
Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them
the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives.
These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is
the power to send them there. Shall we look to her to strike the first
blow which shall wrench her sisters from the grip of the dead hand of
the past?
CHAPTER VI
"For our own sakes--for our children's sakes--" plead the mothers,
"help us! Let us be women, rather than breeding machines."
The women who thus cry out are pleading not only for themselves and
their children, but for society itself. Their plea is for us and
ours--it is the plea for happier conditions, for higher ideals, for a
stronger, more vigorous, more highly developed race.
The letters in this chapter are the voices of humble prophets crying
out to us stop our national habit of human waste. They are warnings
against disaster which we now share and must continue to share as it
grows worse, unless we heed the warning and put our national house in
order.
Can a mother who would "rather die" than bear more children serve
society by bearing still others? Can children carried through nine
months of dread and unspeakable mental anguish and born into an
atmosphere of fear and anger, to grow up uneducated and in want, be a
benefit to the world? Here is what the mother says:
"I have read in the paper about you and am very interested in Birth
Control I am a mother of four living children and one dead the oldest
10 and baby 22 months old. I am very nervous and sickly after my
children. I would like you to advise me what to do to prevent from
having any more as I would rather die than have another. I am keeping
away from my husband as much as I can, but it causes quarrels and
almost separation. All my babies have had marasmus in the first year
of their lives and I almost lost my baby last summer. I always worry
about my children so much. My husband works in a brass foundry it is
not a very good job and living is so high that we have to live as
cheap as possible. I've only got 2 rooms and kitchen and I do all my
work and sewing which is very hard for me."
"I have born and raised 6 children and I know all the hardships of
raising a large family. I am now 53 years old and past having children
but I have 3 daughters that have 2 children each and they say they
will die before they will have any more and every now and again they
go to a doctor and get rid of one and some day I think it will kill
them but they say they don't care for they will be better dead than
live in hell with a big family and nothing to raise them on. It is for
there sakes I wish you to give me that information."
What could the three women mentioned in this letter contribute to the
wellbeing of the future American race? Nothing, except by doing
exactly what they wish to do--refusing to bear children that they do
not want and cannot care for. Their instinct is sound--but what is to
be said of the position of society at large, which forces women who
are in the grip of a sound instinct to seek repeated abortions in
order to follow that instinct? Are we not compelling women to choose
between inflicting injury upon themselves, their children and the
community, and undergoing an abhorrent operation which kills the
tenderness and delicacy of womanhood, even as it may injure or kill
the body?
"I sent for a copy of your magazine and now feel I must write you to
see if you can help me.
"I was a high school girl who married a day laborer seven years ago.
In a few months I will again be a mother, the fourth child in less
than six years. While carrying my babies am always partly paralyzed on
one side. Do not know the cause but the doctor said at last birth we
must be 'more careful,' as I could not stand having so many children.
Am always very sick for a long time and have to have chloroform.
"We can afford help only about 3 weeks, until I am on my feet again,
after confinement. I work as hard as I can but my work and my children
are always neglected. I wonder if my body does survive this next birth
if my reason will.
"My baby is only 10 months old and the oldest one of four is 7, and
more care than a baby, has always been helpless. We do not own a roof
over our heads and I am so discouraged I want to die if nothing can be
done. Can't you help me just this time and then I know I can take care
of myself. Ignorance on this all important subject has put me where I
am. I don't know how to be sure of bringing myself around. I beg of
you to help me and anything I can do to help further your wonderful
work I will do. Only help me this once, no one will know only I will
be blessed.
"I not only have a terrible time when I am confined but caring for the
oldest child it preys so on my mind that I fear more defective
children. Help me please!"
The offspring of one feebleminded man named Jukes has cost the public
in one way and another $1,300,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want
more such families? Is this woman standing guard for the general
welfare? Had she been permitted the use of contraceptives before she
was forced to make a vain plea for abortion, would she not have
rendered a service to her fellow citizens, as well as to herself?
"Kindly pardon me for writing this to you, not knowing what trouble
this may cause you. But I've heard of you through a friend and realize
you are a friend of humanity. If people would see with your light, the
world would be healthy. I married the first time when I was eighteen
years old, a drinking man. I became mother to five children. In 1908
my husband died of consumption. I lost two of my oldest children from
the same disease, one at 16 and the other at 23. The youngest of them
all, a sweet girl of nineteen, now lies at ---- sanatorium expecting
to leave us at any time. The other sister and brother look very
poorly.
"I have always worked very hard, because I had to. In 1913 I married
again, a good man this time, but a laboring man, and our constant fear
and trouble is what may happen if we bring children into the world.
I'm forty-six years old this month and not very well any more, either.
So a godsend will be some one who can tell me how to care for myself,
so I can be free from suffering and also not bring mortals to earth to
suffer and die."
Not even the blindest of all dogmatists can ignore the danger to the
community of to-day and the race of to-morrow in permitting an insane
woman to go on bearing children. Here is a letter which tells a
two-sided story--how mother instinct, even when clouded by periodic
insanity, seeks to protect itself and society, and how society
prevents her from attaining that end:
"There is a woman in this town who has six children and is expecting
another. Directly after the birth of a child, she goes insane, a
raving maniac, and they send her to the insane asylum. While she is
gone, her home and children are cared for by neighbors. After about
six months, they discharge her and she comes home and is in a family
way again in a few months. Still the doctors will do nothing for her.
"She is a well-educated woman and says if she would not have any more
children, she is sure she could be entirely free from these insane
spells.
"If you will send me one of your pamphlets, I will give it to her and
several others equally deserving.
"I was left without a father when a girl of fourteen years old. I was
the oldest child of five. My mother had no means of support except her
two hands, so we worked at anything we could, my job being nurse girl
at home while mother worked most of the time, as she could earn more
money than I could, for she could do harder work.
"I wasn't very strong and finally after two years my mother got so
tired and worn out trying to make a living for so many, she married
again, and as she married a poor man, we children were not much better
off. At the age of seventeen I married a man, a brakeman on
the ---- Railroad, who was eleven years older than I. He drank some and
was a very frail-looking man, but I was very ignorant of the world and did
not think of anything but making a home for myself and husband. After
eleven months I had a little girl born to me. I did not want more
children, but my mother-in-law told me it was a terrible sin to do
anything to keep from having children and that the Lord only sent just
what I could take care of and if I heard of anything to do I was told
it was injurious, so I did not try.
"In eleven months again, October 25, I had another little puny girl.
In twenty-three months, Sept. 25th, I had a seven-lb. boy. In ten
months, July 15, I had a seven-months baby that lived five hours. In
eleven months, June 20, I had another little girl. In seventeen
months, Nov. 30, another boy. In nine months a four months'
miscarriage. In twelve months another girl, and in three and a half
years another girl.
"All of these children were born into poverty; the father's health was
always poor, and when the third girl was born he was discharged from
the road because of his disability, yet he was still able to put
children into the world. When the oldest child was twelve years old
the father died of concussion of the brain while the youngest child
was born two months after his death.
"Now, Mrs. Sanger, I did not want those children, because even in my
ignorance I had sense enough to know that I had no right to bring
those children into such a world where they could not have decent
care, for I was not able to do it myself nor hire it done. I prayed
and I prayed that they would die when they were born. Praying did no
good and to-day I have read and studied enough to know that I am the
mother of seven living children and that I committed a crime by
bringing them into the world, their father was syphilitic (I did not
know about such things when I was a girl). One son is to be sent to
Mexico, while one of my girls is a victim of the white slave traffic.
"I raised my family in a little college town in ---- and am well known
there, for I made my living washing and working for the college people
while I raised my little brood. I often wondered why those educated
well-to-do people never had so many children. I have one married
daughter who is tubercular, and she also has two little girls, only a
year apart. I feel so bad about it, and write to ask you to send me
information for her. Don't stop your good work; don't think it's not
appreciated; for there are hundreds of women like myself who are not
afraid to risk their lives to help you to get this information to poor
women who need it."
Every ill that we are trying to cure to-day is reflected in them. The
wife who through an unwilling continence drives her husband to
prostitution; habitual drunkenness, which prohibition may or may not
have disposed of as a social problem; mothers who toil in mills and
whose children must follow them to that toil, adding to the long train
of evils involved in child labor; mothers who have brought eight, ten,
twelve or fifteen undernourished, weakly children into the world to
become public burdens of one sort or another--all these and more, with
the ever-present economic problem, and women who are remaining
unmarried because they fear a large family which must exist in want;
men who are living abnormal lives for the same reason. All the social
handicaps and evils of the day are woven into these letters--and out
of each of them rises these challenging facts: First, oppressed
motherhood knows that the cure for these evils lies in birth control;
second, society has not yet learned to permit motherhood to stand
guard for itself, its children, the common good and the coming race.
And one reading such letters, and realizing their significance, is
constrained to wonder how long such a situation can exist.
CHAPTER VII
The women who thus cry for aid are the victims of ignorance. Awakening
from that ignorance, they are demanding relief. Had they been
permitted a knowledge of their sex functions, had they had some
guiding principle of motherhood, those who at this late day are asking
for contraceptives would have swept aside all barriers and procured
them long ago. Those who are appealing for abortions would never have
been in such a situation.
To the woman who wishes to have children, we must give these answers
to the question when not to have them.
These facts are now so well known that they would need little
discussion here, even if space permitted. Miscarriages, which are
particularly frequent in cases of syphilis and pelvic deformities, are
a great source of danger to the health and even to the life of the
mother. Where either parent suffers from gonorrhea, the child is in
danger of being born blind. Tuberculosis in the parent leaves the
child's system in such condition that it is likely to suffer from the
disease. Childbearing is also a grave danger to the tubercular mother.
A tendency to insanity, if not insanity itself, may be transmitted to
the child, or it may be feebleminded if one of the parents is insane
or suffers from any mental disorder. Drunkenness in the parent or
parents has been found to be the cause of feeblemindedness in the
offspring and to leave the child with a constitution too weak to
resist disease as it should.
In brief, a woman should avoid having children unless both she and the
father are in such physical and mental condition as to assure the
child a healthy physical and mental being. This is the answer that
must be made to women whose children are fairly sure of good care,
sufficient food, adequate clothing, a fit place to live and at least a
fair education.
What shall this woman say to a society that would make of her body a
reproductive machine only to waste prodigally the fruit of her being?
Does society value her offspring? Does it not let them die by the
hundreds of thousands of want, hunger and preventable disease? Does it
not drive them to the factories, the mills, the mines and the stores
to be stunted physically and mentally? Does it not throw them into the
labor market to be competitors with her and their father? Do we not
find the children of the South filling the mills, working side by side
with their mothers, while the fathers remain at home? Do we not find
the father, mother and child competing with one another for their
daily bread? Does society not herd them in slums? Does it not drive
the girls to prostitution and the boys to crime? Does it educate them
for free-spirited manhood and womanhood? Does it even give them during
their babyhood fit places to live in, fit clothes to wear, fit food to
eat, or a clean place to play? Does it even permit the mother to give
them a mother's care?
The woman of the workers knows what society does with her offspring.
Knowing the bitter truth, learned in unspeakable anguish, what shall
this woman say to society? The power is in her hands. She can bring
forth more children to perpetuate these conditions, or she can
withhold the human grist from these cruel mills which grind only
disaster.
Shall she say to society that she will go on multiplying the misery
that she herself has endured? Shall she go on breeding children who
can only suffer and die? Rather, shall she not say that until society
puts a higher value upon motherhood she will not be a mother? Shall
she not sacrifice her mother instincts for the common good and say
that until children are held as something better than commodities upon
the labor market, she will bear no more? Shall she not give up her
desire for even a small family, and say to society that until the
world is made fit for children to live in, she will have no children
at all?
CHAPTER VIII
The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of
the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself has
wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and while
enslaving herself has enslaved the world. The physical suffering to be
relieved is chiefly woman's. Hers, too, is the love life that dies
first under the blight of too prolific breeding. Within her is wrapped
up the future of the race--it is hers to make or mar. All of these
considerations point unmistakably to one fact--it is woman's duty as
well as her privilege to lay hold of the means of freedom. Whatever
men may do, she cannot escape the responsibility. For ages she has
been deprived of the opportunity to meet this obligation. She is now
emerging from her helplessness. Even as no one can share the suffering
of the overburdened mother, so no one can do this work for her. Others
may help, but she and she alone can free herself.
The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot
be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a
measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call
herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call
herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will
not be a mother.
It does not greatly alter the case that some women call themselves
free because they earn their own livings, while others profess freedom
because they defy the conventions of sex relationship. She who earns
her own living gains a sort of freedom that is not to be undervalued,
but in quality and in quantity it is of little account beside the
untrammeled choice of mating or not mating, of being a mother or not
being a mother. She gains food and clothing and shelter, at least,
without submitting to the charity of her companion, but the earning of
her own living does not give her the development of her inner sex
urge, far deeper and more powerful in its outworkings than any of
these externals. In order to have that development, she must still
meet and solve the problem of motherhood.
Look at it from any standpoint you will, suggest any solution you
will, conventional or unconventional, sanctioned by law or in defiance
of law, woman is in the same position, fundamentally, until she is
able to determine for herself whether she will be a mother and to fix
the number of her offspring. This unavoidable situation is alone
enough to make birth control, first of all, a woman's problem. On the
very face of the matter, voluntary motherhood is chiefly the concern
of the woman.
It is persistently urged, however, that since sex expression is the
act of two, the responsibility of controlling the results should not
be placed upon woman alone. Is it fair, it is asked, to give her,
instead of the man, the task of protecting herself when she is,
perhaps, less rugged in physique than her mate, and has, at all
events, the normal, periodic inconveniences of her sex?
Having learned this much, she has yet something more to learn. Women
are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to
think as men think, to try to solve the general problems of life as
men solve them. If after attaining their freedom, women accept
conditions in the spheres of government, industry, art, morals and
religion as they find them, they will be but taking a leaf out of
man's book. The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not
needed to think man's thoughts. She need not fear that the masculine
mind, almost universally dominant, will fail to take care of its own.
Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the
feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a
human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its
activities.
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by
that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that
within her which struggles for expression. Her eyes must be less upon
what is and more clearly upon what should be. She must listen only
with a frankly questioning attitude to the dogmatized opinions of
man-made society. When she chooses her new, free course of action, it must
be in the light of her own opinion--of her own intuition. Only so can
she give play to the feminine spirit. Only thus can she free her mate
from the bondage which he wrought for himself when he wrought hers.
Only thus can she restore to him that of which he robbed himself in
restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As
it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this
ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That
right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to
knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision.
CHAPTER IX
Absolute continence was the ideal of the early Christian church for
all of its communicants, as shall be seen in another chapter. We shall
also see how the church abandoned this standard and now confines the
doctrine of celibacy to the unmarried, to the priesthood and the nuns.
The Rev. Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 issued the first of
those works which exemplified what is called the Malthusian doctrine,
also advocated celibacy or absolute continence until middle age.
Malthus propounded the now widely recognized principle that population
tends to increase faster than the food supply and that unlimited
reproduction brings poverty and many other evils upon a nation. His
theological training naturally inclined him to favor continence--not
so much from its practicability, perhaps, as because he believed that
it was the only possible method.
What is the result of forcing continence upon those who are not fitted
or do not desire to practice it? The majority opinion of medical
science and the evidence of statistics are united on this point.
Enforced continence is injurious--often highly so.
"Dr. Bertillon shows that in France, Belgium and Holland married men
live considerably longer than single ones," writes Dr. Charles R.
Drysdale, in summing up the matter in "_The Population Question_" "and
are much less subject to becoming insane, criminal or vicious." From
the same studies we learn that the conjugal state is also more
favorable to the health of the woman over twenty years of age, in the
three countries covered.
Much of the responsibility for this feeling upon the part of many
thousands of women must be laid to two thousand years of Christian
teaching that all sex expression is unclean. Part of it, too, must be
laid to the dominant male's habit of violating the love rights of his
mate.
The habit referred to grows out of the assumed and legalized right of
the husband to have sexual satisfaction at any time he desires,
regardless of the woman's repugnance for it. The law of the state
upholds him in this regard. A husband need not support his wife if she
refuses to comply with his sexual demands.
Of the two groups of women who regard physical union either with
disgust and loathing, or with indifference, the former are the less
numerous. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of them. I have
listened to their stories often, both as a nurse in obstetrical cases
and as a propagandist for birth control. An almost universal cause of
their attitude is a sad lack of understanding of the great beauties of
the normal, idealistic love act. Neither do they understand the
uplifting power of such unions for both men and women. Ignorance of
life, ignorance of all but the sheer reproductive function of mating,
and especially a wrong training, are most largely responsible for this
tragic state of affairs. When this ignorance extends to the man in
such a degree as to permit him to have the all too frequent coarse and
brutal attitude toward sex matters, the tragedy is only deepened.
Truly the church and those "moralists" who have been insisting upon
keeping sex matters in the dark have a huge list of concealed crimes
to answer for. The right kind of a book, a series of clear, scientific
lectures, or a common-sense talk with either the man or woman will
often do away with most of the repugnance to physical union. When the
repugnance is gone, the way is open to that upliftment through sex
idealism which is the birthright of all women and men.
When I have had the confidence of women indifferent to physical union,
I have found the fault usually lay with the husband. His idea of
marriage is too often that of providing a home for a female who would
in turn provide for his physical needs, including sexual satisfaction.
Such a husband usually excludes such satisfaction from the category of
the wife's needs, physical or spiritual.
This man is not concerned with his wife's sex urge, save as it
responds to his own at times of his choosing. Man's code has taught
woman to be quite ashamed of such desires. Usually she speaks of
indifference without regret; often proudly. She seems to regard
herself as more chaste and highly endowed in purity than other women
who confess to feeling physical attraction toward their husbands. She
also secretly considers herself far superior to the husband who makes
no concealment of his desire toward her. Nevertheless, because of this
desire upon the husband's part, she goes on "pretending" to mutual
interest in the relationship.
Only the truth, plainly spoken, can help these people. The woman is
condemned to physical, mental and spiritual misery by the ignorance
which society has fixed upon her. She has her choice between an
enforced continence, with its health-wrecking consequences and its
constant aggravation of domestic discord, and the sort of prostitution
legalized by the marriage ceremony. The man may choose between
enforced continence and its effects, or he may resort to an unmarried
relationship or to prostitution. Neither of these people--the one
schooled directly or indirectly by the church and the other trained in
the sex ethics of the gutter--can hope to lift the other to the
regenerating influences of a pure, clean, happy love life. As long as
we leave sex education to the gutter and houses of prostitution, we
shall have millions of just such miserable marriage failures.
For a long time the "safe period" was suggested by physicians. It was
also the one method of birth control countenanced by the
ecclesiastics. Women are learning from experience and specialists are
discovering by investigation that the "safe period" is anything but
safe for all women. Some women are never free from the possibility of
conception from puberty to the menopause. Others seemingly have "safe
periods" for a time, only to become pregnant when they have begun to
feel secure in their theory. Here again, continence must give way, as
a method of birth control, to contraceptives.
Its devotees testify that they avoid ill effects and achieve the
highest possible results. These results are due, probably, to two
factors.
First, those who practice Karezza are usually of a high mental and
spiritual development and are, therefore, capable of an exalted degree
of self-control without actual repression. Second, they have the
benefit of that magnetic interchange between man and woman which makes
for physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. This stimulation becomes
destructive irritation in ordinary forms of continence.
The Oneida Community, a religious group comprising about 130 men and
150 women, which occupied a part of an old Indian reservation in the
state of New York, were the chief exponents of "male continence." The
practice was a religious requirement with them and they laid great
stress upon three different functions which they attributed to the
sexual organs. They held that these functions were urinary,
reproductive and amative, each separate and distinct in its use from
the others. Cases are cited in which both men and women are said to
have preserved their youth and their sexual powers to a ripe old age,
and to have prolonged their honeymoons throughout married life. The
theory, however, interesting as it may be when considered as
"continence," is not to be relied upon as a method of birth control.
Summing it all up, then, continence may meet the needs of a few
natures, but it does not meet the needs of the masses. To enforce
continence upon those whose natures do not demand it, is an injustice,
the cruelty and the danger of which has been underestimated rather
than exaggerated. It matters not whether this wrong is committed by
the church, through some outworn dogma; by the state, through the laws
prohibiting contraceptives, or by society, through the conditions
which prevent marriage when young men and women reach the age at which
they have need of marriage.
The world has been governed too long by repression. The more
fundamental the force that is repressed the more destructive its
action. The disastrous effects of repressing the sex force are written
plainly in the health rates, the mortality statistics, the records of
crime and the entry books of the hospitals for the insane. Yet this is
not all the tale, for there are still the little understood hosts of
sexually abnormal people and the monotonous misery of millions who do
not die early nor end violently, but who are, nevertheless, devoid of
the joys of a natural love life.
CHAPTER X
CONTRACEPTIVES OR ABORTION?
Society has not yet learned the significance of the age-long effort of
the feminine spirit to free itself of the burden of excessive
childbearing. It has been singularly blind to the real forces
underlying the cause of infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.
It has permitted the highest and most powerful thing in woman's nature
to be hindered, diverted, repressed and confused. Society has
permitted this inner urge of woman to be rendered violent by
repression until it has expressed itself in cruel forms of family
limitation, which this same society has promptly labeled "crimes" and
sought to punish. It has gone on blindly forcing women into these
"crimes," deaf alike to their entreaties and to the lessons of
history.
Most of the women of the middle and upper classes in America seem
secure in their knowledge of contraceptives as a means of birth
control. Under present conditions, when the laws in most states regard
this knowledge, howsoever it be imparted, as illicit, and the federal
statutes prohibit the sending of it through the mails, even the women
in more fortunate circumstances sometimes have difficulty in getting
scientific information. Nevertheless, so strong is their purpose that
they do obtain it and use it, correctly or incorrectly.
This question, too, the church, the state and the moralist must
answer. The knowledge of contraceptive methods may yet for a time be
denied to the woman of the working class, but those who are
responsible for denying it to her, and she herself, should understand
clearly the dangers to which she is exposed because of the laws which
force her into the hands of the abortionist.
In the male organs there are glands called testes. They secrete a
fluid called the semen. In the semen is the life-giving principle
called the sperm.
If no children are desired, the meeting of the male sperm and the ovum
must be prevented. When scientific means are employed to prevent this
meeting, one is said to practice birth control. The means used is
known as a contraceptive.
If, however, a contraceptive is not used and the sperm meets the ovule
and development begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its
further growth is called abortion.
It is only the women of wealth who can afford the best medical skill,
care and treatment both at the time of the operation and afterwards.
In this way they escape the usual serious consequences.
The women whose incomes are limited and who must continue at work
before they have recovered from the effects of an abortion are the
great army of sufferers. It is among such that the deaths due to
abortion usually ensue. It is these, too, who are most often forced to
resort to such operations.
If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is
not altogether safe from harm. The womb may not return to its natural
size, but remain large and heavy, tending to fall away from its
natural position. Abortion often leaves the uterus in a condition to
conceive easily again and unless prevention is strictly followed
another pregnancy will surely occur. Frequent abortions tend to cause
barrenness and serious, painful pelvic ailments. These and other
conditions arising from such operations are very likely to ruin a
woman's general health.
While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as
justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds
of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a
disgrace to civilization.
The effects of such operations upon a woman, serious as they may be,
are nothing as compared to the injury done her general health by drugs
taken to produce the same result. Even such drugs as are prescribed by
physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists
are often worse still.
Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many
women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks
of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as
they usually do, to bring the child to birth.
Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the
cloak of stupid hypocrisy. If the laws against imparting knowledge of
scientific birth control were repealed, nearly all of the 1,000,000 or
2,000,000 women who undergo abortions in the United States each year
would escape the agony of the surgeon's instruments and the long trail
of disease, suffering and death which so often follows.
"He who would combat abortion," says Dr. Hirsch, "and at the same time
combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would
fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection. For contraceptive
measures are important weapons in the fight against abortion.
"America has a law since 1873 which prohibits by criminal statute the
distribution and regulation of contraceptive measures. It follows,
therefore, that America stands at the head of all nations in the huge
number of abortions."
The woman who goes to the abortionist's table is not a criminal but a
martyr--a martyr to the bitter, unthinkable conditions brought about
by the blindness of society at large. These conditions give her the
choice between the surgeon's instruments and the sacrificing of what
is highest and holiest in her--her aspiration to freedom, her desire
to protect the children already hers. These conditions--not the
woman--outface society with this question:
CHAPTER XI
Some methods are more dependable than others, just as there are some
more simple of adjustment than others. Some are cheap and less
durable; others are expensive and last for years. There are some which
for a quarter of a century have stood the test of certainty in
Holland, France, England and the United States among the wealthier
classes, as the falling birth rate among these classes indicates. And
just as the reliable, primitive wheelbarrow is antiquated beside the
latest airplane, so, as scientific investigators turn their attention
more and more to this field, will the awkward, troublesome methods of
the past give way to the simpler, more convenient methods of the
morrow.
One of the most common practices of this kind is that of nursing one
baby too long in the hope of preventing the birth of the next. The
"poor whites" of the South and many of the foreign-born women of the
United States pin their hopes to this method. Often they persist in
nursing a child until it is eighteen months old--almost always until
they become pregnant again.
A woman may, and often does, become pregnant before she can make use
of a douche. This is particularly likely to happen if her uterus is
low. And the woman who does much walking, who stands for long hours or
who uses the sewing machine a great deal is likely to have a low
uterus. It is then much easier for the spermatazoa to enter almost
directly into the womb than it would otherwise be, and the douche, no
matter how soon it is used, is likely to be ineffective. The tendency
of the uterus to drop under strain goes far to explain why some women
who have depended upon the douche for years suddenly find themselves
pregnant. Do not depend upon the douche. As a cleansing agent, it is a
necessary part of every woman's toilet, but it is not a preventive.
CHAPTER XII
The weakness of craft unionism is that it does not carry its principle
far enough. It applies its policy of limitation of numbers only to the
trade. In his home, the worker, whether he is a unionist or
non-unionist, goes on producing large numbers of children to compete
with him eventually in the labor market.
This has been the way of labor from the beginning. It is labor's way
in every country.
"It is the same in Berlin. For 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
that of fifty, a very poor quarter gives 157 births; a rich quarter
gives 47 births."
Infant Mortality
Father's Earnings Rate
Under $521.................. 197.3
$521 to $624................ 193.1
$625 to $779................ 163.1
$780 to $899................ 168.4
$900 to $1,199.............. 142.3
$1,200 or over.............. 102.
Ample........................ 88.
Despite this high infant death rate, the workers of the United States
still have more children than they can care for. There are enough of
them left over to provide 3,000,000 child laborers, who by working for
a pittance crowd their parents out of employment and force the
families deeper into poverty.
When all is said and done, the workers who produce large families have
themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed
grasping for jobs, for the strike breakers, for the policemen who beat
up and arrest strikers and for the soldiers who shoot strikers down.
All these come from the families of workingmen. Their fathers and
mothers are workers for wages. Out of the loins of labor they come
into the world and compel surplus labor to betray labor that is
employed.
What are the concrete things which the worker can gain at once through
birth control? First, a small family can live much better than a large
one upon the wages now received. Workers could be better fed, clothed
and educated. Again, fewer children in the families of the workers
would tend to check the rise in the prices of food, which are forced
up as the demand increases. Within a few years it would reduce the
number of workers competing for jobs. The worker could the more easily
force society to give him more of the product of his labor--or all of
it. And while these things are taking place, the slums, with their
disease, their moral degradation and all their sordid accompaniments,
would automatically disappear. No worker would need to live in such
tenements--hence they would be modernized or torn down. At the same
time, the few children that were being born to the workers would be
stronger, healthier, more courageous. They would be fit human
beings--not miserable victims of murderous conditions.
A few years of systematic agitation for birth control would put labor
in a position to solve all its problems. Labor, organized or
unorganized, must take heed of this fact. Groups and parties working
for a new social order must include it in their programmes. No social
system, no workers' democracy, no Socialist republic can operate
successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth
control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.
As each bull was sent into the arena, he was confronted by one
assailant and twenty _confusers_. There was but one enemy for him to
face, but there were twenty brilliant flags, each of a different
color, to distract his attention from the man who held the weapon. No
sooner was his real antagonist in danger, than one of the confusers
fluttered a flag before his anger-maddened eyes. With one toss of his
horns he could have ripped the life from the toreador, but his
confusers were always there with the flags. One after another he
charged them, only to spend the force of his lunges in the empty air.
He found that as he was about to toss one of his confusers into the
air, he was confronted by another flag, which he charged with equal
futility.
It will be the drama of labor until labor finds its real enemy. That
enemy is the reproductive ability of the working class which gluts the
channels of progress with the helpless and weak, and stimulates the
tyrants of the world in their oppression of mankind.
For the past one hundred years most of the nations of Europe have been
piling up terrific debts to humanity by the encouragement of unlimited
numbers. The rulers of these nations and their militarists have
constantly called upon the people to breed, breed, breed! Large
populations meant more people to produce wealth, more people to pay
taxes, more trade for the merchants, more soldiers to protect the
wealth. But more people also meant need of greater food supplies, an
urgent and natural need for expansion.
Owing to the part Germany played in the war, a survey of her birth
statistics is decidedly illuminating. The increase in the German birth
rate up to 1876 was great. Though it began to decline then, the
decline was not sufficient to offset the tremendous increase of the
previous years. There were more millions to produce children, so while
the average number of births per thousand was somewhat smaller, the
net increase in population was still huge. From 41,000,000 in 1871,
the year the Empire was founded, the German population grew to
approximately 67,000,000 in 1918. Meanwhile her food supply increased
only a very small per cent. In 1910, Russia had a birth rate even
higher than Germany's had ever been--a little less than 48 per
thousand. When czarist Russia wanted an outlet to the Mediterranean by
way of Constantinople, she was thinking of her increasing population.
Germany was thinking of her increasing population when she spoke as
with one voice of a "place in the sun."
"For some time past Germany has no longer been in the position of
feeding her own population, and large quantities of food as
raw-materials have to be imported, for which exports have to be exchanged.
It is doubtful whether even this can for long keep pace with the
present rate of increase of population."
The militaristic claim for Germany's right to new territory was simply
a claim to the right of life and food for the German babies--the same
right that a chick claims to burst its shell. If there had not been
other millions of people claiming the same right, there would have
been no war. But there were other millions.
The German rulers and leaders pointed out the fact that expansion
meant more business for German merchants, more work for German workmen
at better wages, and more opportunities for Germans abroad. They also
pointed out that lack of expansion meant crowding and crushing at
home, hard times, heavy burdens, lack of opportunity for Germans, and
what not. In this way, they gave the people of the Empire a startling
and true picture of what would happen from overcrowding. Once they
realized the facts, the majority of Germans naturally welcomed the
so-called war of defense.
The argument was sound. Once the German mothers had submitted to the
plea for overbreeding, it was inevitable that imperialistic Germany
should make war. Once the battalions of unwanted babies came into
existence--babies whom the mothers did not want but which they bore as
a "patriotic duty"--it was too late to avoid international conflict.
The great crime of imperialistic Germany was its high birth rate.
It has always been so. Behind all war has been the pressure of
population. "Historians," says Huxley, "point to the greed and
ambition of rulers, the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the
debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars
which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the
causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations,
and thereby point their story with a moral. But beneath all this
superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited
multiplication."
When Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were on trial in England
in 1877 for publishing information concerning contraceptives, Mrs.
Besant put the case bluntly to the court and the jury:
"I have no doubt that if natural checks were allowed to operate right
through the human as they do in the animal world, a better result
would follow. Among the brutes, the weaker are driven to the wall, the
diseased fall out in the race of life. The old brutes, when feeble or
sickly, are killed. If men insisted that those who were sickly should
be allowed to die without help of medicine or science, if those who
are weak were put upon one side and crushed, if those who were old and
useless were killed, if those who were not capable of providing food
for themselves were allowed to starve, if all this were done, the
struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among
brutes and would doubtless result in the production of a higher race
of men.
There remains only the third expedient--birth control, the real cure
for war. This fact was called to the attention of the Peace Conference
in Paris, in 1919, by the Malthusian League, which adopted the
following resolution at its annual general meeting in London in June
of that year:
"The Malthusian League desires to point out that the proposed scheme
for the League of Nations has neglected to take account of the
important questions of _the pressure of population_, which _causes the
great international economic competition_ and rivalry, and of the
_increase of population_, which is put forward as a justification for
_claiming increase of territory_. It, therefore, wishes to put on
record its belief that the League of Nations will only be able to
fulfill its aim _when it adds a clause_ to the following effect:
"'That each Nation desiring to enter into the League of Nations shall
pledge itself _so to restrict its birth rate_ that its people shall be
able to live in comfort _in their own dominions without need_ for
territorial expansion, and that it shall recognize that _increase of
population shall not justify_ a demand either for increase of
territory or for the compulsion of other Nations to admit its
emigrants; so that when all Nations in the League have shown their
ability to live on their own resources without international rivalry,
they will be in a position to fuse into an international federation,
and territorial boundaries will then have little significance.'"
This remedy can be applied only by woman and she will apply it. She
must and will see past the call of pretended patriotism and of glory
of empire and perceive what is true and what is false in these things.
She will discover what base uses the militarist and the exploiter make
of the idealism of peoples. Under the clamor of the press, permeating
the ravings of the jingoes, she will hear the voice of Napoleon, the
archtype of the militarists of all nations, calling for "fodder for
cannon."
"Woman is given to us that she may bear children," said he. "Woman is
our property, we are not hers, because she produces children for
us--we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our possession as the
fruit tree is that of the gardener."
Upon woman the burden and the horrors of war are heaviest. Her heart
is the hardest wrung when the husband or the son comes home to be
buried or to live a shattered wreck. Upon her devolve the extra tasks
of filling out the ranks of workers in the war industries, in addition
to caring for the children and replenishing the war-diminished
population. Hers is the crushing weight and the sickening of soul. And
it is out of her womb that those things proceed. When she sees what
lies behind the glory and the horror, the boasting and the burden, and
gets the vision, the human perspective, she will end war. She will
kill war by the simple process of starving it to death. For she will
refuse longer to produce the human food upon which the monster feeds.
CHAPTER XIV
Upon the shoulders of the woman conscious of her freedom rests the
responsibility of creating a new sex morality. The vital difference
between a morality thus created by women and the so-called morality of
to-day, is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and
freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission.
What part will birth control play in bringing forth this new standard?
What effect will its practice have upon woman's moral development?
Will it lift her to heights that she has not yet achieved, and if so,
how? Why is the question of morality always raised by the objector to
birth control? All these questions must be answered if we are to get a
true picture of the relation of the feminine spirit to morals. They
can best be answered by considering, first, the source of our present
standard of sex morals and the reasons why those standards are what
they are; and, second, the source and probable nature of the new
morality.
Let us see how these principles have affected the development of the
present moral codes and some of their shifting standards. When we have
finished this analysis, we shall know why objectors to birth control
raise the "morality" question.
The church has sought to keep women ignorant upon the plea of keeping
them "pure." To this end it has used the state as its moral policeman.
Men have largely broken the grip of the ecclesiastics upon masculine
education. The ban upon geology and astronomy, because they refute the
biblical version of the creation of the world, are no longer
effective. Medicine, biology and the doctrine of evolution have won
their way to recognition in spite of the united opposition of the
clerics. So, too, has the right of woman to go unveiled, to be
educated, and to speak from public platforms, been asserted in spite
of the condemnations of the church, which denounced them as
destructive of feminine purity. Only in sex matters has it succeeded
in keeping the bugaboo alive.
It is within the marriage bonds, rather than outside them, that the
greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated. Church and state,
through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality.
It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality
will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning.
In the days when the church was striving for supremacy, when it needed
single-minded preachers, proselyters and teachers, it fastened upon
its people the idea that all sexual union, in marriage or out of it,
is sinful. That idea colors the doctrines of the Church of Rome and
many other Christian denominations to this hour. "Marriage, even for
the sake of children was a carnal indulgence" in earlier times, as
Principal Donaldson points out in "_The Position of Women Among the
Early Christians._" [Footnote: Contemporary Review, 1889.] It was held
that the child was "conceived in sin," and that as the result of the
sex act, an unclean spirit had possession of it. This spirit can be
removed only by baptism, and the Roman Catholic baptismal service even
yet contains these words: "Go out of him, thou unclean spirit, and
give place unto the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete."
The early church taught that there were enough children on earth. It
needed missionaries more than it needed babies, and impressed upon its
followers the idea that the birth wails of the infant were a protest
against being born into so sordid a world.
The very force of the sex urge in humanity compelled the church to
abandon the teaching of celibacy for its general membership. Paul, who
preferred to see Christians unmarried rather than married, had
recognized the power of this force. In the seventh chapter of the
First Epistle to the Corinthians (according to the Douay translation
of the Vulgate, which is accepted by the Church of Rome), he said:
"8--But I say unto you the unmarried and the widows; it is good if
they continue even as I.
These doctrines, together with the teaching that sex life is of itself
unclean, formed the basis of morality as fixed by the Roman church.
Nor does the St. James version of the Bible, generally used by
Protestant churches to-day, differ greatly in these particulars from
the accepted Roman Catholic version, as a comparison will show.
And again: "One would have imagined that Christianity would have
favored the extension of woman's freedom. In a very short time women
are seen only in two capacities--as martyrs and deaconesses (or nuns).
Now what the early Christians did was to strike the male out of the
definition of man, and human being out of the definition of woman. Man
was a human being made to serve the highest and noblest purposes;
woman was a female, made to serve only one."
Thus the position attained by women of Greece and Rome through the
exercise of family limitation, and in a considerable degree of
voluntary motherhood, was swept away by the rising tide of
Christianity. It would seem that this pernicious result was
premeditated, and that from the very early days of Christianity, there
were among the hierarchy those who recognized the creative power of
the feminine spirit, the force of which they sought to turn to their
own uses. Certain it is that the hierarchy created about the whole
love life of woman an atmosphere of degradation.
Fear and shame have stood as grim guardians against the gate of
knowledge and constructive idealism. The sex life of women has been
clouded in darkness, restrictive, repressive and morbid. Women have
not had the opportunity to know themselves, nor have they been
permitted to give play to their inner natures, that they might create
a morality practical, idealistic and high for their own needs.
On the other hand, church and state have forbidden women to leave
their legal mates, or to refuse to submit to the marital embrace, no
matter how filthy, drunken, diseased or otherwise repulsive the man
might be--no matter how much of a crime it might be to bring to birth
a child by him.
Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes
exceed the unlawful ones a million to one. She has had nothing to say
as to whether she shall have strength sufficient to give a child a
fair physical and mental start in life; she has had as little to do
with determining whether her own body shall be wrecked by excessive
child-bearing. She has been adjured not to complain of the burden of
caring for children she has not wanted. Only the married woman who has
been constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of
husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women
in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes
become inconsequential in nature and in number.
And in this lies the answer to the question why the opponent of birth
control raises the moral issue. Sex morals for women have been
one-sided; they have been purely negative, inhibitory and repressive. They
have been fixed by agencies which have sought to keep women enslaved;
which have been determined, even as they are now, to use woman solely
as an asset to the church, the state and the man. Any means of freedom
which will enable women to live and think for themselves first, will
be attacked as immoral by these selfish agencies.
What effect will the practice of birth control have upon woman's moral
development? As we have seen in other chapters, it will break her
bonds. It will free her to understand the cravings and soul needs of
herself and other women. It will enable her to develop her love nature
separate from and independent of her maternal nature.
It goes without saying that the woman whose children are desired and
are of such number that she can not only give them adequate care but
keep herself mentally and spiritually alive, as well as physically
fit, can discharge her duties to her children much better than the
overworked, broken and querulous mother of a large, unwanted family.
Thus the way is open to her for a twofold development; first, through
her own full rounded life, and next, through her loving, unstrained,
full-hearted relationship with her offspring. The bloom of mother love
will have an opportunity to infuse itself into her soul and make her,
indeed, the fond, affectionate guardian of her offspring that
sentiment now pictures her but hard facts deny her the privilege of
being. She will preserve also her love life with her mate in its
ripening perfection. She will want children with a deeper passion, and
will love them with a far greater love.
What healthier grounds for the growth of sound morals could possibly
exist than the ample spiritual life of the woman just depicted? Free
to follow the feminine spirit, which dwells in the sanctuary of her
nature, she will, in her daily life, give expression to that high
idealism which is the fruit of that spirit when it is unhampered and
unviolated. The love for her mate will flower in beauty of deeds that
are pure because they are the natural expression of her physical,
mental and spiritual being. The love for desired children will come to
blossom in a spirituality that is high because it is free to reach the
heights.
To achieve this she must have a knowledge of birth control. She must
also assert and maintain her right to refuse the marital embrace
except when urged by her inner nature.
The truth makes free. Viewed in its true aspect, the very beauty and
wonder of the creative impulse will make evident its essential purity.
We will then instinctively idealize and keep holy that physical-spiritual
expression which is the foundation of all human life, and in that
conception of sex will the race he exalted.
When women have raised the standards of sex ideals and purged the
human mind of its unclean conception of sex, the fountain of the race
will have been cleansed. Mothers will bring forth, in purity and in
joy, a race that is morally and spiritually free.
CHAPTER XV
One of the important duties before those women who are demanding birth
control as a means to a New Race is the changing of our so-called
obscenity laws. This will be no easy undertaking; it is usually much
easier to enact statutes than to revise them. Laws are seldom exactly
what they seem, rarely what their advocates claim for them. The
"obscenity" statutes are particularly deceptive.
Enacted, avowedly, to protect society against the obscene and the
lewd, they make no distinction between the scientific works of human
emancipators like Forel and Ellis and printed matter such as they are
ostensibly aimed at. Naturally enough, then, detectives and
narrow-minded judges and prosecutors who would chuckle over pictures that
would make a clean-minded woman shudder, unite to suppress the
scientific works and the birth-control treatises which would enable
men and women to attain higher physical, mental, moral and spiritual
standards.
Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will
not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask
themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in
ignorance to preserve her purity. In the birth-control movement, she
has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal
interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature. This is the
third and most important of the epoch-making battles for general
liberty upon American soil. It is most important because it is to
purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely
free.
The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty
reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution. It had for
its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might
choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs. If this political
freedom is now lost to us, it is because we did not hold strongly
enough to those liberties fought for by our forefathers.
Nearly a hundred years after the Revolution the battle for religious
liberty came to a climax in the career of Robert G. Ingersoll. His
championship of the much vaunted and little exercised freedom of
religious opinion swept the blasphemy laws into the lumber room of
outworn tyrannies. Those yet remaining upon the statute books are
invoked but rarely, and then the effort to enforce them is ridiculous.
Within a few years the tragic combination of false moral standards and
infamous obscenity laws will be as ridiculous in the public mind as
are the now all but forgotten blasphemy laws. If the obscenity laws
are not radically revised or repealed, few reactionaries will dare to
face the public derision that will greet their attempts to use them to
stay woman's progress.
The French have a saying concerning "mort main"--the dead hand. This
hand of the past reaches up into the present to smother the rising
flame of modern ideals, to reforge our chains when we have broken
them, to arrest progress. It is the hand of such as have lived on
earth but have not loved humanity. At the call of those who fear
progress and freedom, it rises from the gloom of forgotten things to
oppress the living.
It is the dead hand that holds imprisoned within the obscenity laws
all direct information concerning birth control. It is the dead hand
that thus compels millions of American women to remain in the bondage
of maternity.
Previous to the year 1868, the obscenity laws of the various states in
the Union contained no specific prohibition of information concerning
contraceptives. In that year, however, the General Assembly of New
York passed an act which specifically included the subject of
contraceptives. The act made it exactly as great an offense to give
such information as to exhibit the sort of pictures and writings at
which the legislation was ostensibly aimed.
Comstock has passed out of public notice. His body has been entombed
but the evil that he did lives after him. His dead hand still reaches
forth to keep the subject of prevention of conception where he placed
it--in the same legal category with things unclean and vile. Forty
years ago the laws were changed and the chief work of Comstock's life
accomplished. Those laws still live, legal monuments to ignorance and
to oppression. Through those laws reaches the dead hand to bring to
the operating table each year hundreds of thousands of women who
undergo the agony of abortion. Each year this hand reaches out to
compel the birth of hundreds of thousands of infants who must die
before they are twelve months old.
Like many laws upon our statute books, these are being persistently
and intelligently violated. Few members of the well-to-do and wealthy
classes think for a single moment of obeying them. They limit their
families to one, two or three well-cared-for children. Usually the
prosecutor who presents the case against a birth-control advocate,
trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children
at all or a small family. The family of the judge who passes upon the
case is likely to be smaller still. The words "It is the law" sums it
all up for these officials when they pass sentence in court. But these
words, so magical to the official mind, have no weight when these same
officials are adjusting their own private lives. They then obey the
higher laws of their own beings--they break the obsolete statutes for
themselves while enforcing them for others.
This is not the situation with the poorer people of the United States,
however. Millions of them know nothing of reliable contraceptives.
When women of the impoverished strata of society do not break these
laws against contraceptives, they violate those laws of their inner
beings which tell them not to bring children into the world to live in
want, disease and general misery. They break the first law of nature,
which is that of self preservation. Bound by false morals, enchained
by false conceptions of religion, hindered by false laws, they endure
until the pressure becomes so great that morals, religion and laws
alike fail to restrain them. Then they for a brief respite resort to
the surgeon's instruments.
The above provision would take care of the case of the woman who is
ill, or who is plainly about to become ill, but it does not take care
of the vast body of women who have not yet ruined their health by
childbearing and who are not yet suffering from diseases complicated
by pregnancy. If this amendment had been attached to the laws in all
the states, there would still remain much to be done.
CHAPTER XVI
What these diseases are and what dangers are involved in pregnancy are
known to every practitioner of standing. Specialists have not been
negligent in pointing out the situation. Eager to enhance or protect
their reputations in the profession, they continually call out to one
another: "Don't let the patient bear a child--don't let pregnancy
continue."
The warning has been sounded most often, perhaps, in the cases of
tubercular women. "In view of the fact that the tubercular process
becomes exacerbated either during pregnancy or after childbirth, most
authorities recommend that abortion be induced as a matter of routine
in all tubercular women," says Dr. J. Whitridge Williams,
obstetrician-in-chief to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in his treatise
on _Obstetrics_. Dr. Thomas Watts Eden, obstetrician and gynecologist
to Charing Cross Hospital and member of the staffs of other notable
British hospitals, extends but does not complete the list in this
paragraph on page 652 of his _Practical Obstetrics_: "Certain of the
conditions enumerated form absolute indications for the induction of
abortion. These are nephritis, uncompensated valvular lesions of the
heart, advanced tuberculosis, insanity, irremediable malignant tumors,
hydatidiform mole, uncontrollable uterine hemorrhage, and acute
hydramnios."
Does any physician believe that the picture is overdrawn? I have known
of many such cases. A recent one that came under my observation was
that of a woman who suffered from a disease of the kidneys. Five times
she was taken to a maternity hospital in an ambulance after falling in
offices or in the street. One of the foremost gynecologists of America
sent her out three times without giving her information as to the
contraceptive means which would have prevented a repetition of this
experience.
Why does this situation exist? We do not question the good intent nor
the high purposes of these physicians. We know that they observe a
high standard of ethics and that they are working for the uplift of
the race. But here is a situation that is absurd--hideously absurd.
What is the matter?
Specialists are so busy with their own particular subjects and general
practitioners are so taken up with their daily routine that they
cannot give to the problem of contraception the attention it must
have. Consultation rooms in charge of reputable physicians who have
specialized in contraception, assisted by registered nurses--in a
word, clinics designed for this specialty, would meet this crying
need. Such clinics should deal with each woman individually, taking
into account her particular disease, her temperament, her mentality
and her condition, both physical and economic. Their sole function
should be to prevent pregnancy. In accomplishing this purpose, a
higher standard of hygiene is attained. Not only would a burden be
removed from the physician who sends a woman to such a clinic, but
there would be an improvement in the woman's general condition which
would in a number of ways reflect itself in benefit to her family.
All this for the diseased woman. But every argument that can be made
for preventive medicine can be made for birth-control clinics for the
use of the woman who has not yet lost her health. Sound and vigorous
at the time of her marriage, she could remain so if given advice as to
by what means she could space her children and limit their number.
When she is not given such information, she is plunged blindly into
married life and a few years is likely to find her with a large
family, herself diseased and damaged, an unfit breeder of the unfit,
and still ignorant!
What are the fruits of this woeful ignorance in which women have been
kept? First, a tremendous infant mortality--hundreds of thousands of
babies dying annually of diseases which flourish in poverty and
neglect.
These clinics must not be confused with the white enameled rooms which
we associate with the term in America. They are ordinary offices with
the necessary equipment, or rooms in the homes of the nurses, fitted
out for the work. They are places for consultation and examination,
opened by specially trained nurses who have been instructed by Dr. J.
Rutgers, of The Hague, secretary of the Neo-Malthusian League, who has
devoted his life to this work. There have been more than fifty nurses
trained specially for this work by Dr. Rutgers. As a nurse completes
her course of training, she establishes herself in a community and her
place of consultation is called a clinic.
The general results of this service are best judged by tables included
in the _Annual Summary of Marriages, Births and Deaths in England,
Wales, Etc., for 1912_. [Footnote: (See table on page 208.)]
In Amsterdam, the birth rate dropped from 37.1 for the period of
1881-85 to 24.7 for 1906 and 23.3 in 1912. During the same periods, the
death rate fell from 25.1 to 13.1, and in 1912 to 11.2. Infant
mortality for the same period fell from 203 for each thousand living
births to 90, and in 1912 to 64. Illegitimate fertility also
decreased. Results in other cities, as shown by the table at the end
of this chapter, are exactly similar.
-----------------------------------------------
INFANTILE MORTALITY:
Deaths in first
year................ 203 90 64 per thousand living births
INFANTILE MORTALITY:
Deaths in first
year................. 214 99 66 per thousand living births
These figures are the lowest in the whole list of death rates and
infantile mortalities in the summary of births and deaths in cities in
this report.
Rotterdam:
INFANTILE MORTALITY:
Deaths in first
year................ 209 105 79 per thousand living births
The Hague:
Rotterdam:
CHAPTER XVII
The silence of the centuries has been broken. The wrongs of woman and
the rights of woman have found voices. These voices differ from all
others that have been raised in woman's behalf. They are not the
individual protests of great feminine minds, nor the masculine
remedies for masculine oppression suggested by the stricken
consciences of a few men. Great voices are heard, both of women and of
men, but intermingled with them are millions of voices demanding
freedom.
It would be miraculous indeed if that victory which has been won, had
been gained without great toil, insufferable anguish and sacrifice
such as all persons experience when they dare to brave the conventions
of the dead past or blaze a trail for a new order.
But where the vision is clear, the faith deep, forces unseen rally to
assist and carry one over barriers which would otherwise have been
insurmountable. No part of this wave of woman's emancipation has won
its way without such vision and faith.
This is the one movement in which pioneering was unnecessary. The cry
for deliverance always goes up. It is its own pioneer. The facts have
always stared us in the face. No one who has worked among women can be
ignorant of them. I remember that ever since I was a child, the idea
of large families associated itself with poverty in my mind. As I grew
to womanhood, and found myself working in hospitals and in the homes
of the rich and the poor, the association between the two ideas grew
stronger.
In every home of the poor, women asked me the same question. As far
back as 1900, I began to inquire of my associates among the nurses
what one could tell these worried women who asked constantly: "What
can I do?" It is the voice of the elemental urge of woman--it has
always been there; and whether we have heeded it or neglected it, we
have always heard it. Out of this cry came the birth control movement.
When it came time to arouse new public interest in birth control and
organize a movement, it was found expedient to employ direct and
drastic methods to awaken a slumbering public. The Woman Rebel, a
monthly magazine, was established to proclaim the gospel of revolt.
When its mission was accomplished and the words "birth control" were
on their way to be a symbol of woman's freedom in all civilized
tongues, it went out of existence.
As time went on, the work was extended to various foreign elements of
the population, this being made possible by the enthusiastic
cooperation of workers who speak the foreign languages.
Leagues were formed to organize those who favored changing the laws.
Lectures were delivered throughout the United States. Articles were
written by eminent physicians, scientists, reformers and
revolutionists. Debates were arranged. Newspapers and magazines of all
kinds, classes and languages gave the subject of birth control serious
attention, taking one side or the other of the discussion that was
aroused. New books on the subject began to appear. Books by foreign
authors were reprinted and distributed in the United States. The Birth
Control Review, edited by voluntary effort and supported by a stock
company of women who make contributions instead of taking dividends,
was founded and continues its work.
For ten days the two rooms of this clinic were crowded to their
utmost. Then came the police. We were hauled off to jail and
eventually convicted of a "crime."
Courage like hers and like that of others who have undergone arrest
and imprisonment, or who night after night and day after day have
faced street crowds to speak or to sell literature--the faith and the
untiring labors of still others who have not come into public notice--have
given the movement its dauntless character and assure the final victory.
One dismal fact had become clear long before the Brownsville clinic
was opened. The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic
cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity. The private
practitioners, one after another, shook their heads and replied: "It
cannot be done. It is against the law," and the same answer came from
clinics and public hospitals.
The decision of the New York State Court of Appeals has disposed of
that objection, however, though as yet few physicians have cared to
make public the fact that they take advantage of the decision. While
the decision of the lower courts in my own case was upheld, partly
because I was a nurse and not a physician, the court incidentally held
that under the laws as they now stand in New York, any physician has a
right to impart information concerning contraceptives to women as a
measure for curing or preventing disease. The United States Supreme
Court threw out my appeal without consideration of the merits of the
case. Therefore, the decision of the New York State Court of Appeals
stands. And under that decision, a physician has a right, and it is
therefore his duty, to prescribe contraceptives in such cases, at
least, as those involving disease.
It is true that Section 1142 of the Penal Code of New York State does
not except the medical man, and does not allow him to instruct his
patient in birth control methods, even though she is suffering from
tuberculosis, syphilis, kidney disorders or heart disease. Without
looking farther, the physicians had let that section go at its face
value. No doctor had questioned either its purpose or its legal scope.
The medical profession was content to let this apparent limitation
upon its rights stand, and it remained for a woman to go to jail to
demonstrate the fact that under another section of the same code--1145--the
physician had the vital right just described.
It is safe to say that many physicians do not even yet know of their
legal rights in this matter.
But here is what the New York State Court of Appeals said on January
8, 1918, in an opinion thus far unquestioned and which is the law of
the state:
"The protection thus afforded the physician would also extend to the
druggist, or vendor, acting upon the physician's prescription or
order."
We know of some thirty-five arrests of women and men who have dared
entrenched prejudice and the law to further the cause of birth
control. The persistent work in behalf of the movement, attended as it
was by danger of fines and jail sentences, seemed to puzzle the
authorities. Sometimes they dismissed the arrested persons, sometimes
they fined them, sometimes they imprisoned them. But the protests went
on, and through these self-sacrifices, word of the movement went
constantly to more and more people.
Forced thus to the front, the problems of birth control and the right
of voluntary motherhood have been brought more and more to the
attention of medical students, nurses, midwives, physicians,
scientists and sociologists. A new literature, ranging all the way
from discussion of the means of preventing conception to the social,
political, ethical, moral and spiritual possibilities of birth
control, is coming into being. Woman's cry for liberty is infusing
itself into the thoughts and the consciences and the aspirations of
the intellectual leaders as well as into the idealism of society.
It is but a few years since it was said of The Woman Rebel that it was
"the first un-veiled head raised in America." It is but a few years
since men as well as women trembled at the temerity of a public
discussion in which the subject of sex was mentioned.
But, measured in progress, it is a far cry from those days. The public
has read of birth control on the first page of its newspapers. It has
discussed it in meetings and in clubs. It has been a favorite topic of
discussion at correct teas. The scientist is giving it reverent and
profound attention. Even the minister, seeking to keep abreast of the
times, proclaims it from the pulpit. And everywhere, serious-minded
women and men, those with the vision, with a comprehension of present
and future needs of society, are working to bring this message to
those who have not yet realized its immense and regenerating import.
The American public, in a word, has been permeated with the message of
birth control. Its reaction to that message has been exceedingly
encouraging. People by the thousands have flocked to the meetings.
Only the official mind, serving ancient prejudices under the cloak of
"law and order," has been in opposition.
THE GOAL
Woman's r�le has been that of an incubator and little more. She has
given birth to an incubated race. She has given to her children what
little she was permitted to give, but of herself, of her personality,
almost nothing. In the mass, she has brought forth quantity, not
quality. The requirement of a male dominated civilization has been
numbers. She has met that requirement.
Thus and only thus will woman be able to transmit to her offspring
those qualities which make for a greater race.
Why is all this true of the lower species yet not true of human
beings? The secret is revealed by one significant fact--the female's
functions in these animal species are not limited to motherhood alone.
Every organ and faculty is fully employed and perfected. Through the
development of the individual mother, better and higher types of
animals are produced and carried forward. In a word, natural law makes
the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.
Marriage, quite aside from parentage, also gives two people invaluable
experience. When parentage follows in its proper time, it is a better
parentage because of the mutual adjustment and development--because of
the knowledge thus gained. Few couples are fitted to understand the
sacred mystery of child life until they have solved some of the
problems arising out of their own love lives.
How narrow, how pitifully puny has become motherhood in its chains!
The modern motherhood enfolds one or two adoring children of its own
blood, and cherishes, protects and loves them. It does not reach out
to all children. When motherhood is a high privilege, not a sordid,
slavish requirement, it will encircle all. Its deep, passionate
intensity will overflow the limits of blood relationship. Its beauty
will shine upon all, for its beauty is of the soul, whose power of
enfoldment is unbounded.
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result
of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a
new race. There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion,
nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide.
Neither will children die by inches in mills and factories. No man
will dare to break a child's life upon the wheel of toil.
This is the dawn. Womanhood shakes off its bondage. It asserts its
right to be free. In its freedom, its thoughts turn to the race. Like
begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees. The race is
but the amplification of its mother body, the multiplication of flesh
habitations--beautified and perfected for souls akin to the mother
soul.
In their subjection women have not been brave enough, strong enough,
pure enough to bring forth great sons and daughters. Abused soil
brings forth stunted growths. An abused motherhood has brought forth a
low order of humanity. Great beings come forth at the call of high
desire. Fearless motherhood goes out in love and passion for justice
to all mankind. It brings forth fruits after its own kind. When the
womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another
Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and
the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates
who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the
cross. These and the race that is to be in America await upon a
motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free.
End of Project Gutenberg's Woman and the New Race, by Margaret Sanger
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